POPE CANONIZES 103 MARTYRS IN SEOUL

By HENRY KAMM

Published: May 7, 1984

SEOUL, South Korea, Monday, May 7—
In the first canonization outside Rome since the Middle Ages, Pope John Paul II conferred sainthood Sunday on 93 Koreans and 10 French missionaries who gave their lives for their faith between 1839 and 1867.

Vatican officials said the 103 martyrs canonized were the largest number number of saints created on one occasion. The large number of Koreans also made South Korea the country with the fourth-largest number of saints of the Roman Catholic Church, after Italy, Spain and France.

The Pope performed the canonization at a mass attended by 600,000 people in a square in central Seoul. The crowd, admitted hours before the mass, was unaware that shortly before his arrival John Paul had encountered a man brandishing a toy pistol who pushed toward him on a street near the Seoul cathedral.

Nothing in the Pope's calm demeanor betrayed the fright that the incident provoked among his entourage and Korean security officials. The police described the man as a 22-year-old student who was mentally disturbed. Visit Marks Bicentennial

The canonization was the high point of the Pope's four-day visit to South Korea, which marked the bicentennial of the Roman Catholic faith in this country. The Pope left for Papua New Guinea today.

John Paul, in his homily, paid tribute to what he called the unique character of the arrival of Roman Catholicism here and the circumstances that caused 10,000 early Catholics to be martyred for their faith before religious freedom was proclaimed in 1886.

Sunday evening, amid increased security, the last event of the Pope's visit to Korea brought him face to face with a crowd of young people in a gymnasium. Some of the young people submitted statements to the Pope, and many of them addressed the political and social grievances of a people under authoritarian rule.

''Our working environment is bad and we do not receive adequate compensation for our work,'' a young worker said in a statement to the Pope. ''Our lives are so terrible that our situation prevents us from becoming aware of our human dignity. The news media do not accurately inform people of our real situation and, without labor unions free to present our desires, the lives of workers remain deeply hidden in the shadows of prosperity.''

A university student said: ''Speech and expression have long lost their function of informing correctly. And whenever we assert what we think to be true, some of us are taken to prison, some are forced to enlist in the military and some are driven more to leftism.'' Pope Given Statuette of Jesus

Among the gifts presented to John Paul was a statuette of Jesus that, according to those who gave it to him, was carved out of a toothbrush by grinding it against the floor of a prison cell. They said it was made by ''a student imprisoned for having cried out for truth and justice.'' In response to the statements, the Pope praised his questioners for being ''full of ideals and hopes.''

He urged them not to be discouraged, even when they ''run into a wall of incomprehension.'' But the Pope did not address the specifics of their grievances.

The Pope was more expansive in the canonization ceremony, over which he presided from a huge, high altar, gleaming white and decorated with flowers and bunting, that had been built for the occasion against a backdrop of new office towers rising in the heart of Seoul.

The Pope spoke at length on the way in which the Roman Catholic faith came here. Korea is the only nation to which Catholicism came without priests or missionaries. Koreans who had heard about the faith from China sent a young man to Peking to make contact with priests. He returned, baptized, in 1784, bringing books on Catholicism. This is regarded as the coming of the church to Korea. Religion Spread Without Priests

According to Stephen Cardinal Kim, the Archbishop of Seoul, Catholicism spread in this country for more than 40 years without priests to dispense the sacraments, except for a brief spell in which two Chinese missionaries were active.

The coming of the first priests, from the Society for the Foreign Missions of Paris, who arrived clandestinely in 1836, made it possible for Korean Catholics to be baptized and married and to die in their faith.

The French missionaries slipped across the border from Mongolia or landed at deserted points along the coast during the long period in which Confucianism was the state religion and Catholicism was outlawed for rejecting the cult of ancestors. The Roman Catholic missionaries moved about Korea wearing traditional mourning clothes. A present-day member of the Society for the Foreign Missions of Paris gave a specially made set of mourning clothes to the Pope Sunday as a token gift.

When the presence of the missionaries was discovered, three French bishops and seven priests were beheaded after torture, the last group in 1866. John Paul made them saints on Sunday.

The new saints also include a Korean priest, 45 Korean laymen and 47 women.

There are about 1.7 million Roman Catholics in South Korea, out of a population of 40 million. Little is known about the Catholics who remain in North Korea. Speaking of them and Catholics in China, the Pope prayed ''that they may continue strong.''